"Empathy has become one of those ideas that feels almost untouchable. It's hard to criticize without sounding cold or dismissive, and so we rarely do. In psychology, education, and public life, we're encouraged-often rightly-to understand where people are coming from, especially when their behavior is troubling or difficult to defend. But over time, I've become less certain that empathy, on its own, is the moral guide we sometimes assume it to be."
"When participants watched the fair player experience pain, men and women alike showed strong activation in brain regions associated with empathy and shared distress. That part is not surprising. What was striking was what happened when the cheater was shocked. Many male participants showed reduced activation in empathy-related regions and increased activity in reward-related areas of the brain. Women, on average, continued to show empathic neural responses even toward the cheater."
Empathy often receives uncritical praise, but empathy alone can be an unreliable moral guide. Neuroscience and evolutionary perspectives show that empathy is not automatically wise and can be selectively applied. An experiment had observers watch fair and cheating players receive mild shocks while observers underwent functional neuroimaging. Observers showed strong empathic brain activation to fair players' pain; many male observers showed reduced empathy and increased reward response when cheaters were hurt, while women on average sustained empathic responses. Selective empathy can undermine the norms that support cooperation, trust, and fairness, raising normative questions about how empathy should be applied.
Read at Psychology Today
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